After Death, Soul's Journey A Mystery

In an interview in May, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin talked about his sense of life after death.

"If you try to live a good life and love the Lord," he said, "then one day you will join him. But in terms of specifics, I don't know."

Bernardin's belief that he was passing beyond an earthly existence into an eternal life is the foundation of the Christian faith he spent his life serving.

Yet images of what that life may hold, how the soul makes its journey, are seen by most Catholic theologians today as a profound if exhilarating mystery, certainly far from the sort of graphic depictions of the afterlife that infused the art and iconography of ages past.

Indeed, once people seemed to know. The images hung in the earliest large churches of Christianity, in the 4th and 5th Centuries, showed believers what they might expect to see when they died.

"Art was expressed in imperial terms," said Linda Seidel, professor of art history at the University of Chicago. "God was shown holding a scepter. He was the ruler of heaven and Earth. That image usually was placed against a gold background or a blue one with stars. When the light through the church windows hit these images, it was clear that the celestial domain was a serene, radiant place."

Thus was the afterlife of the era of the Roman Empire based in earthly life.

Similarly, some 700 years later in the Western church, when hell began to be painted, artists based their images on the life they saw around them.

Above the doors of 12th Century churches were images of sinners being beheaded, hung on gallows, stabbed by pitchfork-wielding demons.

Graphic depictions were translated into literature. In the 17th Century, John Bunyan wrote in "The Pilgrim's Progress": "There (in Heaven) we shall be with seraphims and cherubims . . . there we shall see the holy virgins with golden harps; there we shall see men that, by the world, were cut in pieces, burnt in flames . . . for the love that they bare to the Lord of the place; all well and clothed with immortality as with a garment."

Such imagery has proven so strong, so persistent that modern mainstream Catholic theologians are trying to get past it to emphasize instead the enduring truth that afterlife is an extension of life. They describe a border between the here and the after that is not so great a barrier, not menacing but more like the boundary between two friendly countries.

Christianity did not invent that focus. Rev. Frans Jozef vanBeek, John Cardinal Cody Professor of Theology at Loyola University, noted, "Plato makes it clear that there is more to life than meets the eye. The ancient Platonists and Stoics saw life as a daily exercise in meeting death."

"The idea of the other world as a geographical location is gone," said Rev. Zachary Hayes, who teaches theology at Chicago's Catholic Theological Union. "In Dante's `Divine Comedy,' the entrance to that world was through a volcano that actually existed in southern Italy. It was very real.

"But now, symbols of the afterlife are interpreted in human rather than geographical terms.

"My view of Roman Catholic symbolism of heaven, hell and purgatory (a place of temporary suffering for those destined to enter heaven) is how serious we are about human freedom.

"We have the freedom to frustrate the total point of our being. Hell is not a place but the complete frustration of life. It is symbolic of total isolation just as heaven is total communion with others and, especially, with God. Demons represent powers against us. Angels represent powers to help us. They are projections of our own polarities of good and evil."

"The soul is primarily that in us which makes us resemble God," VanBeek said. "The essence of the soul is to trust in God, to abandon yourself to God. That makes death a friend."

In that May interview, Cardinal Bernardin took up the same theme: "We can look at death in two ways," he said, "as an enemy or as a friend. If it's an enemy, we try to avoid it. We go into a state of denial; we become very fearful. But if we see death as a friend, our attitude toward it is different."

The theologian for the archdiocese, Rev. Michael D. Place, wrote an essay just after the cardinal's death that touches on Bernardin's sense of an afterlife. In part, he wrote:

"Truly Joseph Bernardin's eyes were the entryway into his personhood--probingly active, subtle in color and warmly inviting. . . .

"In these later days, the eyes have made visible, almost tangible, something else quite intangible--his spirit. In an ironic manner, as the activity diminished, the color faded and a certain turn to the interior changed the experience of looking into his eyes, something new was encountered.

"Clearly, his vision was turning from this world to where he was going. His spirit was being drawn into the very essence of the eternal spirit that is God; and, as the `eye of his soul' made that turn, if you looked hard, you could almost see it with him.

"He had a new friend; and, much like a small child eager to share, he wanted you to meet this new, so very special friend-- death. And in meeting his friend, you also met the promise to which he was being taken--eternal life."